The Dawn of the Age of Aquarius

I was proofreading a MedPage Todaystory about a plan to hand out "medkits" in preparation for a possible bioterrorist anthrax attack that could kill millions. It ended with:Marcus Reidenberg, MD, . . . likened personal stockpiling of anti-anthrax antibiotics to building fallout shelters during the Cold War.

Fallout shelters . . .

The two words seemed to leap off the page.

Working on this disturbing anthrax story I had sensed a long-forgotten dread that I couldn't quite put my finger on. But Reidenberg's metaphor had nailed it. Those chill whispers were memories of my childhood in the 1950s, the time of the Cold War.

There was a dragon abroad in the land then.

It was only biding its time, and it sooner or later it would strike from the sky with flames and earthquakes and ashes that kill. Its name was Nuclear War. The only way to escape, I knew, was to hide. You needed a fallout shelter.

I didn't know anyone who actually had one, but I found a diagram of how to build one in my father's Popular Mechanics magazine. I studied it quite carefully, hoping we could punch a hole in the cellar floor and build ours down below. Remarkably, my father didn't seem very interested in the project.

But our town constructed a small, above-ground model right smack in front of the municipal hall, to inspire us all -- a concrete affair, not much bigger than a handicapped toilet stall. My father didn't seem particularly impressed by that either.

I couldn't understand why not. A booming air-raid siren still blared from the local factory every Saturday at noon, even though World War II had ended nearly a decade before. A wildly undulating, ululating wooo-ooooo-oooooo wailed over the neighborhood and warned us all to take cover.

It was only practice, we knew, for when the Russians attacked, so we continued to play through the alert and all clear. But I knew that one day fire would actually fall from the sky, an atomic bomb to obliterate us all.

And that's why we had to have air-raid drills in elementary school.

We'd march in grim silence down to the dark, cavernous basement with the overhead pipes where we'd line up in rows facing the cinder block walls. Then, on signal, we'd flop down on our stomachs and bury our faces into one arm to protect our eyes from the blinding flash that comes before the mushroom cloud, and place our other hand over the back of our necks to protect them from being crushed by the falling debris.

I'd lay there on the damp, earthy floor, with my classmates huddled on either side, and wonder where in the basement my little sister was lying and what it was like to be dead.

When I was about 10 I had what I guess were anxiety attacks -- I would cry in the night and have nightmares about war. During the day there were periods when my every other thought was about the world coming to an end. But, mercifully, that eventually passed, and life -- uneasy though it was -- went on.On through the Cuban Missile Crisis when my nightmares almost came true, on through the escalation of our troops in Vietnam in the early '60s. And then things started to change.

One day when I was a sophomore in high school, Miss Picardi, our homeroom teacher, was reviewing the rules and procedures for air-raid drills for the umpteenth time, when Marian Kallman -- the class intellectual -- raised her hand.

"No," she announced. The next time there was an air-raid drill, she was not going to participate.

The collective jaw of the homeroom dropped.

"If we're all going to die anyway, we may as well just stay at our desks."

Raising her chin, she flipped her long, straight hair over her shoulder.

"That way," she continued, "if anyone comes looking for us, they can identify our bodies using the seating chart."

Absolute silence.

The flabbergasted teacher and stony-eyed student stared at each other.

The rest of us grappled with the unthinkable.

First, Marian Kallman had talked back to a teacher. Honor Society students just didn't do that back then.

But was she serious?

Sure, the seating chart wisecrack -- as daring as it was -- was just a joke. But what about the rest of it?

Since kindergarten we had followed our teachers to the basement, like lambs to the slaughter. You mean ... we didn't have to? Was there a reason not to?

What about the fearsome monster that had terrified us for so long? Marian, armed only with sarcasm, had driven the beast -- at least for the moment -- back to its lair.

Then the tension popped. In a burst of excitement with everyone talking at once came cheers and groans, applause and catcalls, laughter and hooting as the children of the Cold War saw the vague shape of something new -- dream or delusion? -- silhouetted against the horizon.

It was a vision that would soon resolve into focus, as the times, they were a changin'.

Peace and love, baby. Protest marches and hootenanies, and daisy stems down the gun barrels.

Maybe nuclear annihilation wasn't our fate. Perhaps the light on the horizon was the dawn of a new age of peace, not the conflagration promised by the dragon.

Well, we who were kids during the days of the Cold War have reached our 60s now. We have grandchildren of our own, and we hope their sleep is less troubled than ours was back then.

The Age of Aquarius never did quite live up to its billing as an era when "peace will guide the planets, and love will steer the stars." But the world hasn't come to an end and at least we haven't blown ourselves up yet.

I smile when I think of my father, a World War II veteran, and what he thought of the peace movement with its hippies and bell bottoms.

But he knew there was no refuge either in fallout shelters or in the gentle hope that war would be no more. One always had to be vigilant. The Cold War was a dangerous time. But they're all dangerous times, as he would say.

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